John Polacek

Wow, what a great few weeks I’ve had. Things started off when on New Year’s Day I posted my Scrollorama plugin to Hacker News and a couple other places. To my great surprise, it shot up to #1 on HN and stayed on the front page for pretty much the whole day. Then it started [...]

Over my holiday/new-baby-time-off break, I took some time to work on a couple new jQuery plugins that I’ve been thinking about. I’m a fan of the various cool scrolly sites out there like this and this. I also dig slideshow presentation plugins like deck.js and reveal.js With that in mind, I’ve created Scrollorama, the jQuery [...]

At the start of each year, I usually write out a list of things I plan on trying to accomplish professionally. For the last couple of years, these lists have mostly consisted of technologies and programming languages I wanted to learn. This year is different. I feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp of [...]

I’ve just posted a new project to Github. This was a quick easy one. It’s a jQuery plugin for making a simple responsive image gallery that scales to fit the size of its container. The project page is at johnpolacek.github.com/ResponsiveThumbnailGallery

I just set up my Github homepage. I’ve been seeing all these people setting up cool project pages and wanted to get in on it. I’ve been posting code to Github for quite some time (and Google Code before that). I made the switch to Git from SVN awhile back. For my own personal workflow, [...]

Here are a few of the things that I have been into lately: Startup Podcasts. My current favorite, Tech Zing, as well as Mixergy and Startups For the Rest of Us Ted Talks about holy shit stuff going on in energy and medicine Node.js, and the excellent collection of tutorials at nodetuts.com HTML5 WebSockets and [...]

Last week, I posted sizeit.js, a javascript utility for responsive web design, to github. It is a simple script that detects screen width and loads external css. Works kinda like media queries. Why not just use media queries? This article outlines some of the problems with them. The reason I created sizeit was for building [...]

The dominant scripting language of the web is JavaScript. This should not be a controversial statement. Yet, among some Flash Devs, it might be. I still enjoy ActionScript, but getting more into the front end HTML/CSS/JS stack has been a lot of fun. Like other developers diving into JavaScript, my first instinct was to do [...]

Match the Letter has just passed 10,000 downloads in total. A big thanks to everyone who downloaded it (and especially those who gave it a good rating). Hope your kids are enjoying the game! After 10K downloads of the game, something that stood out was small number of downloads for Android compared to iOS. Despite [...]

Been a real busy couple months working on a few different projects, most of which I can’t really talk about too much in detail. New App – Collaborating on a new app with a friend. Building with the Corona SDK once again for iOS and Android, and also going to build a web app version [...]